Using mainstream models and assumptions, Mr. Knappenberger finds that in the year 2050
with a 83% emissions reduction (the
aspirational goal of Waxman-Markey, the
beginning steps of which are under vigorous
debate), the temperature reduction is nine
hundredths of one degree Fahrenheit,
or
two years of avoided warming by 2050.

A more realistic
climate bill would be a fraction
of this amount.

The author will
respond to technical questions on
methodology and results and invites input on
alternative scenarios and analyses.

The economics and the regulatory
burdens of climate change bills are forever being analyzed, but
the bills’ primary function - mitigating future climate change -
is generally ignored.

Perhaps that’s because it is simply
assumed.

After all, we are barraged daily
with the horrors of what the climate will become if we don’t
stop emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (the primary
focus being on emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels).

So doing something as drastic as that proposed by Waxman-Markey
- a more than 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from the
United States by the year 2050 - must surely lessen the chances
of climate catastrophe. Mustn’t it?

But if that were the case,

Why
aren’t the climate impacts being touted?

Why aren’t
Representatives Waxman and Markey waving around the projected
climate success of their bill?

Why aren’t they saying:

“Economics and regulations be damned. Look how our bill is going
to save the earth from human-caused climate apocalypse”?

That reason is that it won’t. And they know it...

That is why they,
and everyone else who supports such measures, are mum about the
outcome.

The one thing, above all others,
that they don’t want you to know is this:

No matter how the
economic and regulatory issues shake out, the bill will have
virtually no impact on the future course of the earth’s climate.

And this is even in its current “pure” form, without the
inevitable watering down to come.

So discussion of the bill, instead
of focusing on climate impacts, is shrouded in economics and
climate alarm.

Getting a good handle on the future
climate impact of the proposed Waxman-Markey legislation is not
that difficult. In fact, there are several ways to get at it.

But perhaps the most versatile is the aptly named
MAGICC: Model
for the Assessment of Greenhouse-gas Induced Climate Change. MAGICC is sort of a climate model simulator that you can run
from your desktop (available
here).

It was developed by scientists at the
National Center
for Atmospheric Research (primarily by Dr. Tom Wigley) under
funding by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other
organizations.

MAGICC is itself a collection of simple
gas-cycle, climate, and ice-melt models that is designed to
produce an output that emulates the output one gets from much
more complex climate models.

MAGICC can produce in seconds, on
your own computer, results that complex climate models take
weeks to produce running on the world’s fastest supercomputers.
Of course, MAGICC doesn’t provide the same level of detail, but
it does produce projections for the things that we most often
hear about and care about - for instance, the global average
temperature change.

Moreover, MAGICC was developed to be
used for exactly the purpose that we use it here - the purpose
for which Representatives Waxman and Markey and everybody else
who wants a say in this issue should be using it.

That purpose
is, according to MAGICC’s website,

“to compare the global-mean
temperature and sea level implications of two different
emissions scenarios”,

...for example, scenarios both with
and without the proposed legislative emissions reductions.

So that is what we’ll do.
We’ll first use MAGICC to produce a projection of global average
temperature change through the 21st century under two of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s future emissions
scenarios (which assume no explicit policy implementation).

The
two are:

a mid-range emissions scenario (SRES A1B for those
interested in the details)

a high-end emissions scenario (SRES
A1FI)

Then, we’ll modify these IPCC scenarios by entering in
the emissions reductions that will occur if the provisions
outlined in the
Waxman-Markey Climate Change Bill are fully met
(leaving aside whether or not that could be done).

Basically,
Waxman-Markey calls for U.S. emissions to be reduced to 20%
below the 2005 emissions level by 2020, 42% below 2005 levels by
2030, and 83% below 2005 levels by 2050. We’ll assume that U.S.
emissions remain constant at that reduced value for the rest of
the century.

We’ll then use MAGICC to produce temperature
projections using these modified scenarios and compare them with
the original projections.*

And here is what we get all rolled
into one simple figure.

The solid lines are the projections
of the change in global average temperature across the 21st
century from the original IPCC A1FI (red) and A1B (blue) high
and mid-range emissions scenarios, respectively (assuming a
climate sensitivity of 3ºC).

The dotted lines (of the same
color) indicate the projected change in global average surface
temperature when the emissions reductions prescribed by
Waxman-Markey are factored in.

By the year 2050, the Waxman-Markey
Climate Bill would result in a global temperature “savings” of
about 0.05ºC regardless of the IPCC scenario used - this is
equivalent to about 2 years’ worth of warming. By the year 2100,
the emissions pathways become clearly distinguishable, and so to
do the impacts of Waxman-Markey.

Assuming the IPCC mid-range
scenario (A1B) Waxman-Markey would result in a projected
temperature rise of 2.847ºC, instead of 2.959ºC rise - a
mere 0.112ºC temperature “savings.”

Under the IPCC’s high-emissions
scenario, instead of a projected rise of 4.414ºC, Waxman-Markey
limits the rise to 4.219ºC - a “savings” of 0.195ºC. In either
case, this works out to about 5 years’ worth of warming.

In
other words, a full implementation and adherence to the
emissions restrictions provisions described by the Waxman-Markey
Climate Bill would result only in setting back the projected
rise in global temperatures by a few years - a scientifically
meaningless prospect.

(Note: I present the results to three
significant digits, not that they are that precise when it comes
to the real world, but just so that you can tell the results
apart).

Now, various aspects of the
MAGICC model parameters can be tweaked, different climate models
can be emulated, and different scenarios can by chosen. And
different answers will be obtained.

That is the whole purpose of MAGICC - to be able to examine the sensitivity of the output to
these types of changes.

But if you take the time to download MAGICC yourself and run your own experiments, one thing that you
will soon find out is: No matter what
you try, altering only U.S. emissions will produce unsatisfying
results if you seek to save the world by altering its climate.

We have calculated only the climate
impact of the United States acting alone. There is no successor
treaty to the Kyoto Protocol to bind other countries to
greenhouse gas emissions reductions. But, truth be told, the
only countries of any real concern are China and India.

The
total increase in
China’s
emissions since the year 2000 is 50 percent greater than the
total increase from rest of the world combined and is growing by
leaps and bounds. And consider that India carbon dioxide
emissions haven’t started to dramatically increase yet.

But it
is poised to do so, and an Indian official recently
stated that,

“It is morally wrong for us to agree to reduce
[carbon dioxide emissions] when 40 percent of Indians do not
have access to electricity.”

Without a large reduction in the
carbon dioxide emissions from both China and India - not just a
commitment but an actual reduction - there will be nothing
climatologically gained from any restrictions on U.S. emissions,
regardless whether they come about from the Waxman-Markey bill
(or other cap-and-trade proposals), from a direct carbon tax, or
through some EPA regulations.

This is something that should be
common knowledge. But it is kept carefully guarded.

The bottom line is that a reduction
of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions of greater than 80%, as
envisioned in the Waxman-Markey climate bill will only produce a
global temperature “savings” during the next 50 years of about
0.05ºC.

Calculating this isn’t all that difficult or costly. All
it takes is a little MAGICC.

There are many parameters that can
be altered when running MAGICC, including the climate
sensitivity (how much warming the model produces from a doubling
of CO2 concentration) and the size of the effect
produced by aerosols. In all cases, we’ve chosen to use the
MAGICC default settings, which represent the middle-of-the-road
estimates for these parameter values.

Also, we’ve had to make some
assumptions about the U.S. emissions pathways as prescribed by
the original IPCC scenarios in order to obtain the baseline U.S.
emissions (unique to each scenario) to which we could apply the
Waxman-Markey emissions reduction schedule.

Therefore, we needed to back out the
U.S. emissions. To do so, we identified which country group the
U.S. belonged to (the
OECD90 group) and then determined the current percentage of
the total group emissions that are being contributed by the
United States - which turned out to by ~50%. We then assumed
that this percentage was constant over time.

In other words, that the U.S.
contributed 50% of the OECD90 emissions in 2000 as well as in
every year between 2000 and 2100. Thus, we were able to develop
the future emissions pathway of the U.S. from the group pathway
defined by the IPCC for each scenario (in this case, the A1B and
the A1FI scenarios).

The Waxman-Markey reductions were
then applied to the projected U.S. emissions pathways, and the
new U.S. emissions were then recombined into the OECD90 pathway
and into the global emissions total over time.

It is the total global emissions
that are entered into MAGICC in order to produce global
temperature projections - both the original emissions, as well
as the emissions modified to account for the U.S. emissions
under Waxman-Markey.

Yesterday’s MasterResource
post (Part I above) looked at the potential climate impacts of the
proposed Waxman-Markey Climate Bill. But I limited my
analysis to only U.S. actions - after
all, Waxman-Markey can’t mandate international man-made
greenhouse gas reduction timetables.

But, what would happen if
the rest of the world wanted to join in?

The
Bottom Line

The ability of the
industrialized world, through emissions reductions alone, to
impact the future course of global climate is minimal.

If,

the U.S.

Canada

Australia

Japan

Europe

the former
Soviet countries,

...all limited their emissions of greenhouse
gases according to the schedule laid out under Waxman-Markey
- a monumental, unexpected development - it would, at most,
avoid only a bit more than one-half of a °C of projected
global warming (out of 4.5°C - or only about 10%).

And
this is under worst-case emissions assumptions;
middle-of-the-road scenarios and less sensitive climate
models produce even less overall impact.

To make any significant in-roads
to lowering the rate (and thus final magnitude) of projected
global temperature rise, the bulk of the emissions reduction
needs to come from other parts of the world, primarily,

Asia

Africa

South America

the
Middle East

The problem is, is that these governments are not inclined
to restrict the energy usage of its citizens - in fact, they
either are in the process of, or are soon hoping to,
significantly expand the amount of energy available
to their (growing) populations - and in the process,
subsuming all potential emissions savings from the (current)
industrialized world.

If supporters of large
greenhouse gas emissions restrictions were really interested
in “saving the world,” they would be putting all of their
effort into getting China and India to buy into their plan -
and then turning to the U.S. up in mop up duty.

As it stands
now, they are talking to the wrong end of the horse.

Background

Over the first decade of the
21st century, global carbon dioxide emissions have been
growing a pretty good clip - in fact, they’ve been growing
at a rate which exceeds the projected rate from the most
extreme scenario envisioned by the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC).

It is also the scenario which,
when fed into the world’s climate models, produces the
greatest warming by the end of the century - about 4.5ºC
(although the world
abounds with
observations that suggests that this temperature rise is
overblown, but that is the subject of a different analysis).

The question I want to explore
here, is,

“if we wanted to do something to ameliorate this
projected temperature rise, what could we do?”

And more
specifically, who are “we”?

The proposed Waxman-Markey
Climate Bill is aimed to reduce the projected rise in global
temperature. This bill calls for a reduction in greenhouse
gases from the United States according to the following
schedule - a 20% reduction (below the 2005 emissions level)
by the year 2020, a 58% reduction by 2030 and a 83%
reduction by 2050.

So, let’s take “we” to be
Americans bound by the emissions reduction schedule laid out
under Waxman-Markey and see what effect that “we” would have
on the projected global temperature increase if “we”
followed the Waxman-Markey plan.

Then, we’ll look at what
would happen if “we” were able to get other parts of the
world to go along with the plan.

Technical Analysis

The extreme IPCC scenario is the
A1FI scenario and is described as a fossil-fuels intensive
scenario of a,

“future world of very rapid economic growth,
global population that peaks in mid-century and declines
thereafter, and the rapid introduction of new and more
efficient technologies” and that the “[m]ajor underlying
themes are convergence among regions, capacity building and
increased cultural and social interactions, with a
substantial reduction in regional differences in per capita
income.”

What this all means in terms of
the IPCC’s vision of future CO2 emissions is shown in Figure
1.

As can be seen in Figure 1, the
emissions from each of the groups increase, with most of the
increase in the first half of the century coming from the
ASIA.

In the last few decades of the second half of the 21st
century, the IPCC projects the emissions from the OECD90
countries to quickly ramp upwards, despite slowed growth or
even declines among other groups and despite little
population growth. This seems like an odd expectation, but I
digress…

Now, what I am going to do,
through the help of
MAGICC (a simple climate model which was developed to
emulate the large-scale output of more complex climate
models and which was designed to explore the impacts of
different emissions scenarios on projected global
temperatures), is show you what happens to future global
temperature projections if the Waxman-Markey emissions
limitation provisions were adopted (and adhered to) by the
U.S. And while I’m at it, I’ll take you through the impacts
of the adoption by the other regions as well.

Figure 2 is the same as Figure
1, except that I have adjusted the future OECD90 emissions
to account for a reduced contribution from the U.S. assuming
we stick to the Waxman-Markey emissions schedule.

Figure 2

Same as Figure 1, except the original OECD90
pathway

(dotted pink line) has been modified to account for

the U.S. adherence to the Waxman-Markey emissions schedule
(solid pink line).

Figure 3 shows what happens to
global temperature projections when the MAGICC model is run
with the original A1FI emissions pathways (shown in Figure
1) as well as when it is run under the modified A1FI
scenario to include U.S. reductions (shown in Figure 2).

The
net result on the projected future global temperatures of a
full adherence to the stipulations of the Waxman-Markey
Climate Bill is a temperature “savings” of 0.06ºC by the
year 2050, increasing to about 0.20ºC by the end of the
century.

Figure 3

Projected global temperatures under the A1FI
scenario (blue)

and the A1FI scenario modified for a U.S.
adherence to

the Waxman-Markey emissions reductions schedule
(red).

So, there you have it -
going it alone, the U.S. succeeds at only managing to knock
off two-tenths of a global temperature rise projected to be
nearly 4.5ºC by 2100. Not a whole lot of bang for
the buck.

So, clearly we (Americans) need
a little, er, a lot of help.

In Figure 4, I depict what
happens to the A1FI emissions pathways if every country of
the world decided that the plan drawn up by Representatives
Waxman and Markey was something that it could not live
without and joined in the effort.

Most notably, instead of
the rapid rises in ASIA emissions that are projected to
occur through the half of the 21st century, the emissions
there top out by 2010 and decline sharply thereafter -
despite a growing population and rapid industrialization -
that’ll be a neat trick to pull off!

Figure 4

Same as Figure 1, except that all groups adhere to

the Waxman-Markey emissions reduction schedule.

Dotted lines
are the original A1FI pathways, solid lines are the modified
pathways.

Figure 5 shows the projected
global temperatures with the different country groups
signing on (i.e. MAGICC run with the modified emissions
scenario depicted in Figure 4).

Figure 5

Projected global temperatures under the A1FI
scenario (blue)

and the A1FI scenario modified for an
adherence to the Waxman-Markey

emissions reductions schedule
by all countries in the world in succession.

The top curve in Figure 5 (the
greatest temperature rise) is projected to occur under the
unfettered A1FI scenario.

The bottom curve (the least
temperature rise) occurs with everyone on-board. The curves
in the middle show who contributes what.

The U.S. acting
alone under Waxman-Markey (as we have seen) reduces the
projected global temperature rise by the year 2100 by
0.195ºC, if the rest of the OECD90 countries come along, the
reduction increases to 0.402ºC - still less than 10% of the
total projected rise.

Even with the help of the REF
countries, we only get a reduction of 0.602ºC. When the
temperature rise really starts to show a decent slowdown is
with the cooperation of the ALM countries (a reduction
1.241ºC). And, of course, the biggest impact, nearly as
large as everyone else combined, comes from the ASIA
countries.

If they alone reduce emissions in line with
Waxman-Markey suggestions, they will produce a 1.129ºC
decline, and when acting along with everyone else they bring
the total temperature reduction to 2.37ºC - a rise that is
more than 50% smaller than projected under the original A1FI
scenario.

Nothing to sneeze at.

(Again, let me stress that I am
describing the impacts on projected global
temperatures. There is growing evidence that actual global
temperatures are not evolving the way projections indicate
that they should. So, the degree to which these temperature
projections described above reflect what really will happen
in the future, is far from certain.)

Conclusion

So, the key to producing a
meaningful change in the course of projected global
temperatures is to make sure that those countries of the
world which are projected to have the greatest contributions
to future emissions growth - primarily the countries in the
ALM and ASIA group - take the actions to insure that those
growth projections are not met.

The United States has an
extremely limited direct role to play in projected future
global climate - internal emissions reductions do virtually
nothing.

So, plans like the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill
really don’t serve to change the climate in and of
themselves. Instead, their purpose is to attempt to spur
technological innovation and set an example as to what can
be done to reduce emissions - with Americans serving both as
the experimenters and the guinea pigs.

It is not the climate
impact of our experiment that is of any significance, but
instead it is the tools that we may develop in attempting to
achieve major emissions reductions, for the only truly
effective course of action we have available to us in
attempting to control the future course of global climate is
to tell the rest of the world what to do and how to do it.

Let’s hope they are agreeable -
for “we” (Americans) are setting ourselves up to take a
great risk for which the outcome, both internally and
externally, is far from certain.